Way Down Yonder in….Washington State?—The Zach Top Phenomenon

A while back, I cancelled my Sirius Radio subscription but soon found myself missing that channel’s Prime Country station, which featured the music of the ‘80s and ‘90s. After Sirius went silent in my vintage Ford Focus, I resorted to old CDs to hear that country of bygone days. But one afternoon, impulsively, I tuned into a few FM stations in the Northern Neck of Virginia-Southern Maryland region. While most of what I heard was what I expected, uninspired, unoriginal and not, strictly speaking, country, occasionally a classic hit would be played. And I discovered that I liked some of the current artists and songs though I would never go so far as to classify them as bona fide country. Then one day, driving east on King’s Highway, I heard “I Never Lie,” a new release by a young man named Zach Top from, of all places, Washington State. As I listened to this song, it was 1994 again.

When I discovered that Zach Top was from the Northwest, I was very surprised. He doesn’t talk like someone from Alabama but neither does he talk like someone from The Evergreen State. There are, however, many Southern dialects, and Southern speech doesn’t boil down merely to one or two diphthongs; it is more than that.

Recently, I made the mistake of reading some comments posted on YouTube regarding Zach Top’s accent. The commentors scathingly referred to him as a phony because no one could speak as he does, they reckoned, if he is a Northwesterner. If the boy from Washington State is a phony, I said to myself, he is a very clever one. Again, he definitely ain’t Montgomery, but he ain’t exactly Seattle either. His accent is pleasant, not jarring like the Northern vernacular, and it seems very natural to me.

I discovered later, however, that Zach Top himself recalled that as a young boy he listened to country songs and tried to imitate the way the artists sang them. He also said that living in Nashville as a young man working construction while also promoting his singing and song writing career had “accentuated” his dialect. But Top’s way of talking doesn’t sound like an affectation no matter how practiced it might be. Could he be the product of a Southern ancestry, a descendant of the Southerners who, beginning in the early 20^th Century, migrated westward. In Washington State, they sought out their own kind. In close-knit communities they preserved their speech, cuisine, music and manners.

But whether or not he is a child of the Southern Diaspora, as is my theory, he is still a gift to all of us redneck throwbacks who have missed hearing our music as we drive along the road in old cars listening to the radio.

I recently watched a video of Zach Top as a child of twelve on stage with the band that he himself formed. He was, at that moment, nothing but a Southern boy as he performed his rendition of “Mule Skinner Blues.” And if further proof is needed that Top, regardless of his ancestry, has a Southern heart, I recommend listening to his songs: “I Never Lie,” “Sounds Like the Radio,” “South of Sanity,” “There’s the Sun,” and especially his cover of “The Last Thing I Needed,” (1) which he does better than Willie himself (with apologies to the Red-headed Stranger).

1. Zach Top - Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning | 98.7 The Bull | PNC Live Studio Session YouTube PNC Live Studio 1.4M views Oct 3, 2024

Next Time: I will be speaking out against avarice and the now rampant disrespect, even hatred, for older generations and for the things that matter. This will involve my saying just a little more on the subject of country music, specifically the newly released McArthur by Hardy, Morgan Wallen, Eric Church and Tim Mcgraw. It is a remarkable song!